The Country Music Association's annual "CMA Country Christmas" concert TV special returns to Bridgestone Arena on November 3, and a slate of both country and non-country stars are once again part of the festivities.

The "CMA Country Christmas" taping is open to public, and starts at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, November 3 at Bridgestone Arena. Tickets are $50-$100 and are on sale now and can be purchased through Ticketmaster or at the Bridgestone Arena Box Office.

Underwood started the online buzz about their return with a tweet Wednesday, saying she was hanging out with Paisley. She joked that she caught him in her makeup chair and added the hash tag "#suchadiva."

CMA confirmed the news on Twitter and Facebook shortly after with a picture of the two stars during a photo shoot.

The CMA Awards will air live Thursday, Nov. 1, on ABC live from Nashville.

Downtown retailers were happily crowded Thursday morning and afternoon with fans seeking their ideas of the good stuff: Sometimes that meant morning booze at Margaritaville Nashville, often it meant live music at various Lower Broadway honky-tonks, and for hundreds it meant combing Ernest Tubb Record Shop for classic country treasures.

The Tubb shops aim to carry the entirety of country music’s recorded history on CD, so for many tourists a trip to the store on Lower Broadway is a chance to pick up favorite material that they can’t find back home.

International guests are plentiful there during CMA Music Festival: Thursday, German speakers and Japanese speakers conversed about the selection (They didn’t converse with each other, because that would have been on toward pointless), and manager Stephen Bowen said French customers had been by on Wednesday.

“It’ll be like this all day and night,” Bowen said, nodding to a crowded sales floor.
Thursday afternoon, Janie Fricke and The Roys performed at the shop, and international favorite (to the point that she now lives in Spain) Rattlesnake Annie will sing at 7:30 p.m. Friday’s docket, which also includes Randy Rudder signing his Chicken Soup For The Country Soul book at noon, and afternoon performances from Bobby Marquez, Bobby Rice, Georgette Jones, and another duel appearance from Fricke and The Roys. Oh, and Russ Varnell plays Friday night at 8 p.m.

Saturday, there’s plenty of music, including a concert by Ernest Tubb’s (the actual Country Music Hall of Famer, not the store that bears his name) old guitarist, Leon Rhodes at 1 p.m. Music continues through Sunday afternoon, concluding with a concert from The Chuck Wagon Gang at 3 p.m.

“I’m so excited,” Nettles says. “I love it so much. Learning the choreography is like fantasy camp to me. I’m not a dancer, though I like dancing, so to be able to have someone teach me and show me and to do that on the stage, I just love it so much.”

Tickets for the CMA Country Christmas taping are $25 for general admission upper level seating and $50 for general admission club level and are available through Ticketmaster, 1-800-745-3000. Show time is 7:30 p.m.

"I love the creative writing process of coming up with ways to lampoon what's happened in the last year, whether that be in country music or the news," said Paisley.

He is co-hosting the show with Carrie Underwood for the fourth year in a row. It's a job that requires charisma, timing and, according to veteran CMA host Vince Gill, self-discipline.

Gill said the only thing he learned from 12 years at the helm was to "know when to shut up."

He said hosting the three-hour live telecast is "really quite a dance." It involves watching the clock and improvising when things don't go as planned.
Ultimately, Paisley and Gill agree that the job is really about making everyone look good. So Hank Jr. shouldn't worry too much.

"I love it, because we're all so nice," said Paisley. "We're not going to go out there and make people feel bad. It's not a Comedy Central roast."

Blake Shelton remade the Kenny Loggins classic “Footloose” for inclusion in the remake of the film, starring Julianne Hough and Kenny Wormald, which hit theaters in October. Now, he’s invited the song’s original singer to perform the classic with him as the opening for the 45th annual CMA Awards on Wednesday.

Swift received her first CMA song of the year nomination for "Mean," her spunky rebuttal to cynical criticism. That trophy goes to the writer, not the artist, and is among Wednesday night's most coveted awards in a town where the songwriter is celebrated and revered.

"Respectfully, it's about time," said Scott Borchetta, head of Swift's label, Big Machine Records. "I don't think she gets near the props she deserves for her songwriting. I've been in the business with Taylor for almost seven years now and her songs were great when I met her at 14."

Swift has gotten her share of love for her songwriting. She won a Grammy for best country song in 2010. Nashville Songwriters Association International has named her songwriter/artist of the year four of the last five years -- and at 21 she remains the youngest winner of that award. And BMI, the performing rights organization, has awarded her all-genre song of the year once and country song of the year three times.

For the third year in a row, the CMA Awards are sold out. The CMA announced this afternoon that all tickets have been sold to this year's show, taking place Nov. 9 at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. It's the quickest sellout the CMAs have enjoyed since moving to the arena in 2006.

Fans without tickets, of course, can still tune in to the live TV broadcast of the awards, airing at 7 p.m. Central on ABC. Many of the same country music stars will be on the Bridgestone stage the following evening for the taping of the CMA Country Christmas, and tickets for that show are still available for $25-$50.